The Social Construction of Literacy Development and

Classroom Ecologies

George Hruby

A wag somewhere once noted that there are two kinds of people in the world:

those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t. By

extension and much elaboration, we might observe further that there are at least two

kinds of people in literacy education in regard to the paradigmatic narratives they employ

in their research: those who subscribe to mechanistic motifs and metaphors, and those

who subscribe to contextualist motifs and metaphors. The mechanistic motifs addressing

what goes on inside learners and knowers are drawn from research from behavioral and

cognitive psychology on learning (e.g., Anderson, 1995; Kintsch, 1998). The

contextualist motifs addressing what goes on between learners and knowers are drawn

from historical and anthropological research on learning communities (e.g., Kirshner &

Whitson, 1997; Lave & Wenger, 1991). We might thus hypothesize that it is because the

cognitivist (mechanistic) and anthropological (contextualist) paradigms are not

commensurable (Kuhn, 1962; Pepper, 1948), that research on learning processes and

learning communities within education has often been at odds, at times quite vehemently

(e.g., the phonics-whole language debate; the basics-critical thinking debate; the

situativist-cognitivist debate, and so on).

For this reason, I was initially encouraged by the development of alternative

attempts to explain learning and literacy development in bio-ecological terms (Abram,

1996; Bidell & Fischer, 1998; Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 2000; Iran-Nejad, 2000; Guthrie,

2000; Hruby, 2001a; Pearson, & Raphael, 1999; Sumara, 2001; Weiner, 2000). Bio-

ecological dynamics, after all, account for both that which occurs inside the organism

(biology) and that which occurs outside the organism (ecology). The distinction between

the biological and ecological is one chosen for its privileging of the multi-cellular

organism as life’s ultimate level of organization – the center of the organic universe, as it

were. This is, of course, a “truth” only multi-cellular organisms such as us would find

self-evident. However, the dynamics of structural organization, supervenience,

adaptation, and agency are similar across the bio-ecological continuum (Michel &

Moore, 1995). And, happy happenstance, it just so happens that human beings “are”

ecologically situated, biological organisms (at least that has been the long-standing and

highly successful narrative assumption of the life sciences). Thus, the ecological motif

seemed to suggest a way to reconcile the inner and outer – cognitive and social – domains

of literacy development.

Unfortunately, these efforts to employ bio-ecological metaphors have been largely

unsuccessful, I believe, because they have generally failed to acknowledge that bio-

ecological systems can only be properly understood within an organicist theoretical

framework (Pepper, 1948)i. To misconstrue the organic as wet mechanics (Kosslyn &

Koenig, 1992) as the cognitive neo-connectionists do, or as merely inter-nested

contextual locations (Bronfenbrenner, 1972) as many “ecological” analyses of classrooms

do, is widely off the mark. It is as much of a travesty as thinking of interpersonal

transactions as the end result of cognitive processes, or of reducing psychological

accounts of behavior to mere rhetorical ploys for privileging the individual over

community. In other words, in paying only lip service to the organic nature of bio-

ecological systems, some researchers promoting supposedly ecological frameworks have

missed the most obvious and helpful characteristics of the organicist trope.

This is not an unimportant matter. Currently, RAND is funding a major long-term

research planning initiative that will set the course for future research (and research

funding) for years to come (Sweet, Kamil, Alvermann, & Strickland, 2001). (The RAND

RSG web site featuring a downloadable pdf. file of the report draft can be found at:

www.RAND.org/multi/achievementforall.) The researchers involved in RAND’s

Reading Study Group are highly respected and justifiably so. But in patching together

their quilt of personal research interests, the issue of just how mechanistic and

contextualist research is to fit together in a theoretically cohesive fashion is not

adequately addressed. Theirs is not a proper resolution, but a temporary truce, one at best

guaranteeing fragmentary and epistemologically anemic understandings of literacy

development, and at worse, continued professional infighting into the future. The fact that

the RAND group has gingerly indicated that development (i.e. growth) might act as a

unifying bridge between the two positions (Anders, 2001) is a masterful bit of irony, for

contexts do not nurture just anything, and machines do not grow regardless of their

contexts. Human development, as it is scientifically understood today, is an inherently

organic, transactional process of extension and integration between and within levels of

bio-ecological organization (Bjorklund, 2000; Elman, et al., 1996; Michel & Moore,

1995).

Though theoretically unsatisfying for literacy education researchers, this situation

is nonetheless a wonderful example of how social processes foster scientific

understandings and worldviews almost without regard for the nature of the central objects

of their inquiry. In a phrase, the social construction of reality, or at least that portion of

reality centered on literacy education, has literacy research stuck in a pair of parallel ruts

on behalf of professional prerogative and the protection of personal legacies. It is this

issue and the thematic dynamics of its construction that I wish to explore in this paper.

The following, therefore, is not a proper research report, but a meditation on the ways in

which we come to construct our understanding of literacy classrooms – what one might

refer to as the ecology of classroom research – and how it can be understood as an

example of scientific social constructionism.

Which Classroom Ecology?

There are two ways in which the ecologies of learning and literacy development

in classrooms can be thought of as socially constructed. The first entails the study and

analysis of the factors at play in fostering patterns of classroom discourse. The

procedures and tone set by the teacher, the personal behaviors and cultural values brought

by the students, the policies and agendas posited by the school administration and the

local school board, as well as parents’ expectations, political pressures from special

interest groups, national policy initiatives, and so on: all of these go into the construction

of certain patterns of practice, discourse, workaday schoolroom reality, or what we might

otherwise describe as a pedagogic ecosystem. By the light of this first definition,

researchers attempt to inventory and account for the multiple and complex transactive

relationships between factors that constitute even as they give rise to such ecologies

(Pearson & Raphael, 1999).

The other approach to describing the construction of classroom ecologies focuses

on the way in which researchers themselves posit and describe learning and literacy

development in classrooms. That is, while the first definition above presumes a

transparent objectivity by researchers in the observation and description of the behaviors

and relationships under examination in a classroom, the alternative definition references

the construction of those observations and descriptions by researchers. Research itself is

an example of the social construction of knowledge which informs our sense of reality –

both directly, in the sense of an accumulation of knowledge artifacts, and indirectly, by

the fostering of models and theoretical frames that allow for coherence across artifacts,

and, indeed, which allow knowledge artifacts to be identified as such. This second

approach to studying the social construction of classroom ecologies might be considered

a special case within the sociology of scientific knowledge, or SSK (Potter, 1996). I

believe researchers ought to address this specialized sense of social construction before

attempting the broader sense, and it is scientific social construction in literacy education

research that we will address in this paper.

Allow us therefore to briefly review how the social construction of realities has

been hypothesized in sociological, psychological, and philosophical research, and

distinguish between the scientific construction of our understanding of the natural world

and the scientific construction of heuristics. I will maintain that it is crucial to

differentiate between these two types of scientific constructs. To make the case for that

distinction, I will cite some well known constructs in psychology and sociocultural

education theory as examples of heuristics that have been inappropriately reified as

aspects of the natural world in either its physical or conceptual sense. I will assert that

confusing our theoretical models with material or ideational realities engages our

predisposition toward territorial claims and all of the aggression, dominance displays, and

promotion of hierarchy endemic to primate sociality at its human worst. I will conclude

by offering a few suggestions on how we might develop an alternative and more cohesive

theoretical framework for literacy research, one informed by empirical research on the

natural world but pointedly distinct from it, that is, one knowingly constructed as a

narrative purely for its heuristic value in advancing research on literacy and learning.

Social Constructionism: Some Clarification

Up front, it is important to distinguish between social constructionism and social

constructivism. The latter is concerned with the social processes that facilitate the

psychological dynamics that produce understanding in learners (Phillips, 2000; Spivey,

1997). Social constructionism, by contrast, is concerned with the social processes

themselves and the cultural artifacts they produce and that identify them (Font & Hruby,

2000). These social processes would include identification, classification, and

legitimization of knowledge as such; identity assignation; and the institutionalization,

preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. Artifacts would include things like books,

libraries, schools, universities, professional organizations, and so on (Hruby, 2000).

These distinctions are generalizations based on historic use (Hruby, 2001a), but they are

not set in stone. Different definitions, inappropriate equation across levels of analysis,

and blurring between the terms is common (Font & Hruby 2000; Hruby, 2001b; Phillips,

2000). This confusion is perhaps fostered by the allowance that, in a weak sense, all

culture is evidence of social construction, from driving a car, to building a work shed, to

dancing the hootchie-cootchie: all demonstrate and can facilitate the distribution of

knowledge.

Use of social constructionist theory in literacy education research has been

inconsistent and somewhat confusing because of the various and often allusive ways it

has been applied (Hruby, 2001a). Some appropriations of the terms and trappings of

social constructionism seem little more than window dressing for ethnographies of

productive classroom practice. This is worthwhile work, but as social constructionist

analysis it has been dismayingly vague. As Schoenfeld (1999) and others have

complained, it is difficult to fashion testable hypothesis from overly broad definitions and

overly general theoretical assertions about “the sociocultural.” On the other hand, some

work in literacy education using social constructionist lenses has been exemplary, both

theoretically rich and philosophically sophisticated (e.g., Blanton, Moorman, Hayes, &

Warner, 1997; Rex, L. A., Green, J. L., Dixon, C. N., & The Santa Barbara Classroom

Discourse Group, 1998). Nonetheless, the exceptions underscore the general tendency: a

failure in most of this research to provide a precise working definition of what the social

construction of knowledge entails, and scant attention to the processes of construction

ongoing in the research itself.

Elsewhere, I have suggested that social constructionism can be historically and

paradigmatically divided into three waves: an empirical wave in sociology beginning in

the 1960s, a postmodern wave in social psychology beginning in the late 1970s, and a

new-realism wave in philosophy of mind and of science in the 1990s (Hruby, 2001b).

The use of the term “waves” in this context was perhaps unfortunate as it suggested more

than that the three approaches in the study of social constructionism succeeded one

another. It also seemed to suggest, in spite of my cautions to the contrary, that the earlier

versions are no longer viable. In fact, all three approaches are possibly useful because

they are paradigmatically distinct and therefore not commensurable (Kuhn, 1962). Lenses

would have been the better term to describe these three ways of focusing inquiry on the

social processes of knowledge formation in communities.

A Brief History of Social Constructionism

One of the more salient features distinguishing these three lenses is where the

bounds of the social construction of knowledge are drawn. For the sociological

empiricists (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1966) the natural world was acknowledged to

include the human organism and its species-specific and species-probable traits.

However, these traits were deemed to include the capacity both for language (semiotic

systems) and culture (the appropriation and modification of aspects of the natural world,

including those aspects directly relating to human lifeways). Hence, humans had the

ability to collectively modify behavior through cultural systems built on language. The

linguistic rationales, identifications, institutions, models of causation, and so on,

developed within communities were matters of social construction born of the dialectic

between individual and society, a dialectic that was constrained by the natural world even

as it was mediated by language.

In this, the empirical sociologists were much in line with what had been suggested

already in pragmatist epistemology (e.g. Dewey & Bentley, 1949). However, many

empirical constructionists had placed their theoretical focus squarely on what the

common man and woman on the street took to be reality sui generis, something presumed

to be quite different from what empirical scientists engaged in. But the pragmatists had

already called this distinction into question (Dewey & Bentley, 1949), as had other

philosophers of science (Kuhn, 1962; Quine, 1969; Pepper, 1948). It wasn’t long before

research on constructionism in science as another variant of the same process gave way to

the second wave in social constructionism.

The postmodernist social psychologists of the 70s and 80s (e.g., Burr, 1995;

Gergen, 1985; Gergen & Davis, 1985; Shotter, 1993) claimed that scientific knowledge

itself – and the greater-than-human world it presumed to represent – were all socially

constructed. Rather than being the result of empirical observation of the natural world,

science was actually the result of humans in social relations making meaning of their

social and semiotic selves within historical and ideological contexts. Scientific reality,

according to the postmodernists, had no more foundational or essential basis for being

enshrined as inarguably factual or natural than any reformulation except insofar as it

served political, ideological, or economic agendas. The numerous epistemological

problems with such an encompassing constructionism became immediately obvious to

critics and eventually obvious even to proponents (Burr, 1998; Gergen, 1998).

For instance, it was difficult to explain how social oppressors were able

themselves to successfully function free of the self-oppressing nature of our shared

discourses and institutions. Worse, claims of oppression could be called into question as

similarly being social constructions, for everything was a social construction – including

the concept of social construction! This self-undermining relativism could only be

deemed liberating by the most anti-rationalist among the postmodernists. Stresses

between the politically driven critical theorists, literary and rhetorical analysts, and

researchers in social psychology proved too great to maintain a growing critical mass in

this vein, and the third wave of social constructionists began to step forward.

The new realists and neo-naturalists in epistemology (e.g., Putnam, 1987),

philosophy of mind (e.g., Block, Flanagan, & Güzeldere, 1998) and philosophy of

science (e.g. Greenwood, 1994) are a varied and recent lot, and it is therefore more

difficult to characterize them. Suffice it to say that their positions are not simply a return

to a naïve positivist empiricism, nor are they champions of reductionist, determinist, or

mechanistic models of causation. Like the empirical constructionists, the neo-realists

acknowledge a natural, greater-than-human world that humans are not merely in, but of.

However, the new realists’ grasp of this bio-ecological relationship is considerably more

sophisticated than that of social constructionists a half century earlier.

For the new realists, our ability to perceive and conceive of our world is

constrained by evolved, species-probable capacities, capacities whose evolution and

development carry the nature of our world (our Umwelt) within them. Those capacities

are predisposed to give emphasis to levels of bio-ecological organization of long-standing

species-specific significance. They thus structure our perceptions and categories through

biologically-grounded qualic phenomena possessing an inherent level of base

significance. By their nature, and by evolutionary necessity, these capacities for

perception, categorization, and concept formation are variously plastic and adaptive to

changing circumstances and can recursively mediate our categorical and conceptual

distinctions in ever more sophisticated ways. Thus, our ability to construct better

understandings of the world (i.e., more adaptive for a fruitful and satisfying condition),

while far from simple or perfectible, is nonetheless usually serviceable and often

improvable.

Like the postmodernists, the neo-realists caution against naïve suppositions about

the seeming obviousness of fact or reality. Much that passes for reality is indeed a

construction, especially in a highly articulated domain such as scientific research. In a

limited sense, everything must be a social (linguistic) construction since everything is

signified in a language that can never be the thing, perception, or conception itself

(Derrida, 1976). But it is not true that every description is therefore equally (or nothing

but) a social construction. Some things are more constructed than others (i.e., rationally

or aesthetically derived, less based on empirical observation). After all, if wishes were

fishes, we’d all live like kings. And we don’t. So successfully negotiating our ecological

surrounds, presumably on the basis of both perception and a knowledge base, must surely

involve more than simply “constructing reality.” Some constructions about the greater-

than-human world are more serviceable than others, and this is often demonstrable.

Indeed, the purpose of science is to pursue such careful demonstrations.

All empirical observation is based on qualic phenomena (sensation and memory)

made coherent through theoretically-informed interpretation. It does not follow from this,

however, that all observations are equally informed (let alone entirely informed) by

theory, or, for that matter, that all statements are entirely informed by interpreted

observation. To this end, there is a distinction to be made between epistemic and

linguistic objectivity (Greenwood, 1995). Thus, we can distinguish at least two types of

scientific construction: those that are attempts to signify careful observations of the

natural world, and those that attempt to hypothesize causal factors not actually observed

or observable, and which indeed may not exist in the natural world at all. In a word, this

is the difference between naturalistic (empirical) and heuristic (rational) constructions.

The psychologists Paul E. Meehl and Kenneth MacCorquodale have proposed a similar

distinction between hypothetical construct (the scientific description of physical or

physiological phenomena) and intervening variable (the stop-gap explanatory

abstraction). The distinction in social constructionism is blurry, however, and these two

types of scientific construction are perhaps at the ends of a continuum. Still, a rifle barrel,

too, is a type of continuum, so I would hedge that it is best to know which end is up when

dealing with a continuum.

Failing to distinguish between when we are measuring and describing processes

and systems of the natural world, and when we are constructing explanatory narratives or

models of the invisible forces presumed at work animating that world is a serious

categorical error. It is one, I believe, that has defined much scientific research in reading

and literacy education over the past 30 years. And this ought to be a concern, for when

we reify our heuristics we are led to embrace a ghost-in-the-machine or over-the-shoulder

dualism that is both philosophically and scientifically unsatisfactory. Worse, we are led to

stake territorial claims on what we mistake to be certainties within and of our

phenomenological domain.

The Cautionary Tale of Research on the Psyche

Let us then distinguish between the scientific construction of heuristics and the

scientific construction of our understanding of the natural world. The construction of

heuristics is chiefly an exercise in constructing facilitative theories that allow us to

rationally think about, discuss, and research things that otherwise we could not (i.e., the

mind, society, unicorns, the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, etc.).

By contrast, the construction of our understanding of the natural world is an exercise in

articulating empirically observable and dependable patterns of ecological constraint and

affordance (i.e., the “laws” of nature that allow us to appropriate natural resources

effectively; observations on how humans tend to use those resources, etc.). It is important

not to conflate and confuse these two types of constructs.

There is a resistance to acknowledging heuristics as such once they have been

thoroughly reified through the processes of social construction. Professions, institutions,

careers, identities, and practices – these things take on a life of their own. Collective

professional identities become as cults, their objects of inquiry fetishes, and their

methodologies rituals. But the existence of such entrenched institutions, practices and

professional communities is not adequate evidence of an empirical reality represented by

the heuristics entertained therein. An example of entrenched institutionalization grounded

on a reified heuristic might clarify what I mean.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, back before the days of the cognitive model of

the mind, there was the psychoanalytic model of the psyche (several, actually). Indeed, it

is worth noting that before the psyche there were religious, essentialist, empiricist, and

romantic models of the spirit, the soul, the pneuma, the humors, the passions, elan vital,

etc., many of which still persist in the general vernacular today (e.g., Moore, 1992;

Redfield,1993). The idea behind all of these is the same. Without some animating force,

the body is presumed to be an inanimate glob of dross matter, nothing more. Historically,

it was inconceivable that living things might, by their vary nature, be self-animating,

largely due both to a legacy of essentialist, dualistic religious dogma, and to the early

scientific use of mechanistic metaphors drawn from Newtonian physics to describe

biological organisms and processes in terms of distinguishable bodies and forces (Dewey

& Bentley, 1949; Johnson, 1987). Something beside the body itself had to account for its

behavior. The hypothetical cause was determined by the way behavioral explication was

narratively justified, but the resulting explanation always suggested the causation worked

the other way around. As a result, the dualism inherent in the initial assumption was

presupposed in any understanding fostered by the model. This sort of circularity is an

unfortunate hallmark of heuristic constructions.

In any event, one of the first major disruptions in the development of

psychoanalytic theory occurred with the break between Sigmund Freud and his colleague,

Carl Jung. One of the reasons for this break was Jung’s acknowledgement that Freud’s

model of the psyche, with its Ego and Id and complexes and sublimations and other

mechanistic arrangements, was not a description of an actual location bounded by time

and space, but rather was a heuristic device. Ultimately, Jung noted, the physical

mechanisms for the behavior of biological organisms such as human beings would be

located in the neurophysiological substrates, but there was no way in the early 20th

century to study such things. In the meantime, Jung explained, models such as Freud’s –

or his own, or Adler’s – allowed researchers, therapists, and their patients to think about

and talk about what would otherwise be ineffable. And this ability to postulate and share

structures of emotion and memory was in and of itself of therapeutic value (Clarke,

1992).

Freud, the logical positivist, vehemently denied Jung’s observation, decrying it as

mysticism – although he himself tacitly acknowledged and tried unsuccessfully to

address the problem in the 1920’s (Holland, 1992). Almost a century later, the consensus

in psychology is that the success of traditional psychoanalysis is anecdotal, meager and

limited to moderate emotional distress. Meanwhile, the impact of psychopharmacological

interventions (based on psychobiological and neuroscientific research) has been

astonishing even in severe cases of psychosis. Thus, the current trend in psychiatric

intervention is based on a situation-specific blend of psychopharmacology, behavior

modification, and talk therapy.

The point of this historical digression is to exemplify how easily heuristic models

can be reified by even the most sophisticated of minds, and to note how such reification

leads to delusions of pseudo-empirical grandiosity. More to the point, it can lead to entire

research agendas, academic departments, professional organizations, publications of

theory and practice, and highly lucrative professional identities fostered by heuristics that

no more describe the real world than a vibrant description of the Easter bunny. Of course,

every spring, countless grandparents across the land delight in the behavior modification

they have encouraged as their grand children cavort about backyard shrubbery in search

of painted eggs. But is that any basis for justifying a program of literacy research?

The point is, the existence of such an institutional status quo built around a reified

heuristic is itself not proof that the heuristic represents causative aspects of the natural

world. And the bald assertion that a heuristic must in fact represent unseen aspects of the

natural world because it is useful as a heuristic makes no sense at all.

Intellectual History Repeating Itself

This brings us to the long and proud legacy of cognitive psychology’s influence in

literacy education research. Like earlier dualistic explanations of human behavior,

cognitive models rely on a stopgap, intervening explanatory device such as the psyche.

That device is called the mind. The mind has a long pre-scientific history as a construct in

the vernacular, so its use in psychology has a certain intuitive appeal. Models of the mind

are said to account for behaviors, and research on behaviors is said to prove the validity

of these models of the mind. The circular reasoning here is obvious, and has been

described as “phlogiston theory” by neuro-philosopher Patricia Churchland (as cited in

Churchland, 1995). (Phlogiston was an imperceptible gas postulated by fifteenth-century

chemists to account for the deterioration of matter by rust and fire. The rationalists who

championed this conceptual breakthrough were certain that phlogiston existed even

though it could not be observed. Proof of the existence of phlogiston was to be had in the

phenomena of rust and fire, the very phenomena phlogiston was supposed to explain.

Similar circular reasoning allowed psychoanalysts to justify models of the psyche on the

basis of complaints, and cognitivists to justify models of the mind on the basis of

behavior.)

The problem with the mind, as with other examples of phlogiston theory, is not

that it makes for a poor heuristic. In fact, the mind is a very powerful pedagogic and

rhetorical device. Research on the mind has allowed for important advances in

educational and behavioral theory, which in turn have informed solid research. Current

models of the mind are certainly more satisfying as intervening variable than the

behaviorists’ black box. And the mind is destined to continue in the vernacular in the

same way that constructs of the soul and of passion do today. The problem is our

believing that because the mind is useful as a heuristic it must therefore represent an

actual, if imperceptible, causative aspect of the natural world.

Such reifications, I suggest, entice researchers to take on the mantle of ontological

certainty and thus engage in a territorial vehemence that demands and indeed fosters

professional unity around an orthodoxy (as demonstrated in the case of Freud and Jung),

but ultimately retards theoretical development within the profession. Such reification

occurs through processes of social construction earlier described. For instance, to have

challenged the hegemony of cognitive assumptions and institutions in psychology during

the past quarter century would have been professionally disastrous. The more recent

advances in psychology along psychobiological and neuroscientific lines has occurred

thanks to an end-run around cognitive certainties that avoided openly acknowledging or

challenging them. Similarly, the development of sociocultural perspectives in literacy

education had more to do with professional exhaustion by many literacy education

researchers over arguments surrounding the minutia of mental processes than with a

coherent critique of the inherent flaws of cognitive models (D. Alvermann, personal

communication).

Again, the problem is not that the mind is “only” a heuristic. Heuristics are

invaluable in advancing human understanding. Nor is the problem the cognitive choice of

mechanistic (and thus reductionist and deterministic) metaphors to describe the mind.

Mechanistic models are very useful at describing many things, particularly machines, and

they are therefore pedagogically useful because they are easy to understand. Nor is the

problem the inherent dualism presumed and promulgated through the circular reasoning

commonly employed, although such dualism is generally in low repute among most

current philosophers of mind (Block, Flanagan & Güzeldere, 1998).

The problem is the unwarranted assertion that the central construct is a natural

fact, and thus inarguable, unmodifiable, and professionally possessable. The mind,

however, does not exist in the natural world, except in so far as it can be described as a

cultural artifact. This is perhaps one reason why research on the mind’s learning does not

always readily translate into effective classroom practice. Theories of the mind’s

structure can inspire literacy research, but it cannot displace or preempt it. Only research

on literacy learning in classrooms can tell us anything about literacy learning in

classrooms.

Intellectual History Repeating Itself Repeating Itself

Lest those of a sociocultural stripe delight too much in this critique of cognitive

psychology’s influence in literacy research, it should be noted that socioculturalists, too,

have run afoul of the same problems. Because socioculturalists rely on a contextualist

motif rather than a mechanistic one, the emphasis is on forces rather than structures, but

the Newtonian-articulated dualism of inert bodies and motivating forces still undergirds

this perspective as it has since Comte founded “Social Physics” in the 1820s.

Socioculturalists also rely on Idealist rather than Materialist philosophical positions,

positing reality as a construct in the realm of ideas rather than in the natural world, but

the determinism of their models is similarly manifest in their narratives (Farrell. 1996).

As with psychological constructs, something other than the ecologically-situated

biological organism in the process of negotiating its contextual surrounds is presumed to

account for that organism’s behavior.

The contextualist motif asserts that phenomena arise from unique contextual

influences or situations. The contexts of general concern are usually the social and the

cultural, although linguistic, semiotic, economic, and ideological contexts are treated

similarly (e.g., Gee, 1990). That which arises from such spatially and temporally unique

circumstances is either itself unique (say some ethnographers and postmodernists), or

exhibits general tendencies of historical progression (say the Hegelians, Marxists, and

Frankfurt School-inspired critical theorists) (Farrell, 1996; Foucault, 1978; Pepper,

1948).

Contexts are usually posited as being two-tier in nature, with an immediate,

observable micro-cultural level of individuals in relation, and a higher, theoretically

postulated macro-cultural level of societal forces contextualizing the micro level. Socio-

historical determinists maintain that the macro socio-historical level constitutes the micro

cultural level in accordance with certain presumed historical inevitabilities, which in turn

constitutes individuals and gives them their sense of identity. Causation is thus basically

top-down and reflects a theoretical rationale for authoritarian socio-economic

arrangements. Other contextualists describe a more transactive relationship between

individual agents and their immediate surround which gives rise to collective generalities

that can feed back upon the lower levels of organization. In these views, agency and

identity are developed recursively over time from immediate experience. Lev Vygotsky

would be an example of a pioneering socio-historical determinist; John Dewey would be

an example of a pioneering transactionalist (Glassman, 2001). Foucault might be an

example of a postmodern contextualist emphasizing the incommensurability of historical

experience.

But, again, as with the cognitivists, the central problem for sociocultural theory is

not with its choice of framing motif. The problem is that socioculturalists posit a macro-

level construct – culture, the social, the socio-historical, etc. – the entirety of which

would elude observation, were it to actually exist, except by way of a God’s-eye view.

Human beings have never had, nor never will have, such an all-encompassing

perspective. Such demiurgic macro-cultural constructs of historical destiny or cultural

influence, therefore, like the construct of the mind or the psyche, by their very nature, can

never be empirically demonstrated; rather, they are only rationally postulated. A non-

believer might suggest that macro-cultural levels of social or discursive organization are

actually abstracted generalizations based on anecdotal observation of behavior and

demographic quantifications drawn from the level of immediate experience --

measurements and observations undertaken and selected precisely because they bolster

the presumed heuristic model of causation being asserted. Thus, the reasoning supporting

these models is as circular as that employed by the cognitivists. More phlogiston.

As with the cognitivists, the socioculturalists tend to reify their heuristic

narratives as actual causative forces, and this encourages the same professional territorial

prerogatives displayed by the earlier cognitivists. Indeed, a dismaying progression of

parallel ideas in Western thought can be identified between those positing internal

causation (the soul, the spirit, the conscious, the psyche, the mind) and those positing

external causation (God’s will, fate, destiny, the zeitgeist, the world spirit, history,

inevitable socio-economic progression, culture, the social, etc.). If the academic debates

between these incommensurable camps take on the tenor of religious wars, it should

come as no surprise. Again, these reifications are bolstered by the processes of social

construction that gives rise to institutional systems, identities, and communities of

practice. And these, quite literally, apart from the posited intervening variables they

entertain, are physical territories that can be fought over. And so they are.

The shibboleth that education is a social practice is often reiterated like a

catechism at many a literacy conference and graduate seminar today. To observe that this

is a rather banal observation is to invite professional rebuke in most quarters of the

profession. To note in addition that history has not been kind to socio-historical prophecy

is to provoke severe ostracization. We have not yet exhausted our recent fascination with

the social, the continental, and the easy heroics of critical polemics. Thus, borrowing a

page on tactics from the psycho-biologists, the best way to produce new knowledge in

literacy education is to avoid challenging sociocultural and cognitive pieties altogether,

and get on instead with an entirely different research agenda, one grounded in an

alternative conceptual motif, staying humble until such time as it bears discernable fruit.

An Incautious Organic Conclusion

This leads us back to a justification of my original interest in bio-ecological

motifs in literacy education. The current “peace accord,” on behalf of balance at RAND

and elsewhere is an attempt at perpetuating the current Two-World Hypothesis approach,

balancing one narrative motif against another, in an effort to preserve personal and

professional positions and legacies. This is understandable, but it can likely lead to the

preservation of the reification, dualism, and theoretical turf wars endemic to our current

condition. And this, I would insist, is an unhappy situation for 21st century researchers.

It would be premature and beyond the scope of this paper to speculate on just

what an organic or bio-ecological motif would entail entirely. Indeed, the development of

such a motif for literacy education research would be a rich area for extensive future

inquiry. There are places to begin, however. Inspirations for an organicist motif might

include work in philosophy (Allen & Bekoff, 1997; Block, Flanagan & Güzeldere, 1998;

Millikan,1984), activity theory (Wertsch, 1998); sociocultural dynamics (Minick, Stone,

& Forman, 1993), situated cognition (Kirshner & Whitson, 1997), ecological psychology

(Reed, 1996), cognitive ethology (Hauser, 1996; Tomasello & Call, 1997),

developmental psychobiology (Michel & Moore, 1996), neo-connectionist models of

neurological processing (Sinha, 1988; Elman, et. al. 1996), situated robotics (Clancey,

1997), and the integration of these perspectives (Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 2000; Clark,

1997; Hendriks-Jansen, 1996).

Though informed by the life and social sciences, the organic motif also needs to

be kept in mind as a heuristic. It should never be posited as an account of factual reality

itself, but only as a means of promoting research on the nature of our realities.

Given the foregoing review, allow me to rather boldly make the following

suggestions:

Literacy education researchers need to:

• allow for the value of heuristics as such and resist the seduction of reification;

• acknowledge that reification is a long-standing foundational problem for our

theories of literacy development;

• address dualism, and accept that, whatever one’s personal or religious views

might be on the subject, it has little place in a scientific understanding of learning or

learning communities;

• explore encompassing motifs that can provide an idiom to include both cultural

and cognitive phenomena – as well as developmental, emotional, motivational,

ideological, and individual factors;

• keep in view our participation as researchers in practices that socially construct

our sense of reality, and the inherent responsibilities to honesty, effectiveness, fairness,

and truth such mindful participation entails.

Given these needs, and what I perceive to be the promise of organicist motifs in

addressing them, I believe that bio-ecological narratives are deserving of a second

chance. Only, this time around, we need to avoid half-hearted attempts and construct

them for real, but not as reality.

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i Stephen Pepper identified the neo-Hegalians as organicists. However, as sophisticated as Pepper’s analysis might be, it was informed by a less than current understanding of organic processes, the study of which has evolved impressively over the past fifty years. For instance, he mistook biological processes to be static (the popular environmentalist misnomer that nature, left to itself, is in a state of perpetual balance is a perpetuation of this outdated belief). He also thought organicist motifs were unduly determinative, and had qualms about the notion of supervenience, or emergence, a notion that was just beginning to get off the ground in philosophy, biology and ecology (Drai, 1999). The noxious legacy of Social Darwinism and eugenics might have been another inspiration for his misgivings. But, if the contextualists and cognitivists who attempt to employ bio-ecological metaphors fail to relocate their models within an organicist framework, the Pepperian organicists in critical literacy research fail to acknowledge and incorporate what is currently understood about the dynamics of bio-ecological systems. Rather, by dint of ideological prescription, critical researchers continue to propose various forms of a cultural determinism that howsoever effective it might be as political analysis is useless as an organic trope. I would therefore, pace Pepper, categorize socio-historical determinists as teleological contextualists.